Tommy Cooper: genius or fool?

Thirty years after his death, David Quantick pays tribute to an
unlikely comedy god

Asking what makes somebody funny is arguably a fruitless task. Being funny can happen in a million ways. You can be a comic who isn’t innately funny in his or her body and delivery – Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello springs to mind, a sour sort of character on stage – or you can be so subtly funny that people don’t necessarily even notice your skill (the brilliant novelist Jonathan Coe rates Ernie Wise very highly).

Some comedians, though, are born funny: we say they have funny bones, as though their sheer comedicness infuses their entire body and soul. And one such comedian was the late Tommy Cooper. He was funny in so many ways, it’s almost an education to list them.

For a start, in a showbusiness world where small men competed for attention, Cooper was far from being a small man. He was 6ft 4in tall and he weighed 15 stone. That in itself was funny. He gangled like a skinnier man, and he had a face that managed to look innocent and confused and baffled and knowing and lovable all at the same time.

His jokes were almost always a triumph of absurdity over common sense, jokes that would be lucky to make it into a Christmas cracker or to pass review by the editorial board of The Dandy. When he told them that face would explode like a batter pudding on the mouth of an exploding cannon.

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He wore a fez, and nobody who was not actually a member of the government of Turkey has ever not looked funny in a fez. Sometimes he did a routine where he dressed half as a man, half as a woman, in a costume bisected down the middle of his body. (Generally he’d get the parts of the man and the woman mixed up, so the brave soldier demanded a kiss from his sad fiancée who was off to the war.) He was fond of prop gags with punchlines – the horn-rimmed glasses lined with real horns, the playing cards that you could play like a harmonica. And he was a magician. He was either a terrible magician prone to flashes of brilliance or – and this is more likely – a brilliant magician who could appear awful at the drop of a wand.

And then there was his thick porridge voice, which mixed up the vowels of his Welsh family with the consonants of Devon and Hampshire. Cooper often sounded a bit drunk, perhaps because he was. The rich slur of his voice made phrases like, “Not like that, like that” and punchlines like “Well, stop doing it then” sound at once absurd and world-weary.

But his real secret, apart from just being funny, is that everything he did, from the gags to the magic to the general demeanour, was a joke, and a joke that the audience was in on. He pretended to be a fool, but he wasn’t; he was a genius.